DAVID BLUM

Musician and Dreamer

"It is my hope that the reader will look upon music, as I have experienced it during my illness as a metaphor for his or her own experience. Each of us has a store of inner gifts. At a time of crisis, any powerful image that arises spontaneously from within oneself - in whatever form - brings with it a creative potential. A friend of mine, a cancer patient, finds precious moments of serenity in conversing with the kindly grandfather she had known only in her childhood. That is her music." -David Blum

David Blum was born on September 7, 1935, in Los Angeles, California and died on April 17, 1998, in Seattle, Washington. He leaves a dual legacy: musical and psychological.

PSYCHOLOGICAL LEGACY

"Sooner or later, we will all have to deal with crises and the question of our mortality.

We all have deep resources in our own ways, and if we listen and trust in them in difficult times,

they can bring us comfort and transcendence." -Yo Yo Ma,from the DVD Appointment with the Wise old Dog

Paralleling his musical life, Blum had an equally compelling passion that belonged to his psychic and spiritual life. For over thirty years, he was in continual conversation with the unconscious – recording, analyzing and drawing his dreams.

"In a sense, I have been a kind of scribe these past thirty-five years, whose medium has been oil-based crayons."

From 1970 to 1985, while living in Switzerland, Blum was privileged to work with Liliane Frey, a colleague and close friend of C.G. Jung. Throughout his fourteen year stay, he substantially added to the pictures he began in his twenties and thirties.

For the most part, he kept his psychological life private. However, after his cancer he began to reveal his drawings to his friends. It was in the last year of his life that he realized his DVD, Appointment with the Wise Old Dog, a crystallization of his thirty-year inner journey. Cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who introduces the film, correctly predicted that it would have “a life of its own.”

The Blum Collection contains in its entirety, this DVD, along with fifty-one dream drawings, seventeen volumes of diaries, and six volumes of journals that document and analyze 1,670 dreams. In addition Blum left a manuscript: Pictures from the Unconscious, an in-depth commentary on each of the fifty-one drawings in the Collection.

As death approached, there was a significant proliferation of his dreams as though a film of his inner life, under the ultimate pressure of time, had to realized. Against overwhelming physical odds, Appointment with the Wise Old Dog was produced to give body to that urge. In this singular film, David Blum's words and drawings, and the music of Mozart and Beethoven, explore pain, creativity, death, and the epic journey of the soul.